It isn’t possible to die of happiness, I’ve learned. It is, however, entirely possible to die of cancer.
I pull my hospital gown round my knees, which bares my bottom to anyone who cares to look. Not that there is anyone else here, apart from the consultant gynecologist who’s probably seen it all before and a little bit more. He is sitting looking at me after his calm, cool bombshell announcement, waiting, presumably, for some response from me.
There’s a big empty space where the comforting thud, thud, thudding of my heart should be, and I swear it takes ten whole minutes for the next beat to kick in. What if I have a heart attack and die of shock before the cancer has a chance to kill me? I laugh out loud at the irony, and the consultant lowers his head and studies his notes.
This is a truly horrible room. The tiles are supposed to be white and clinical, but they’re grubby, gray and cracked all over the place. I’m on an examination table which has a rip in it where I can see the stuffing coming out, and that can’t in any way be classed as hygienic, can it? And this tissue paper I’m sitting on is revolting. It’s more crumpled than I could have made it, and there are already faint yellow stains on it as if someone has used it before, someone with a more leaky disease than me. Goose bumps creep all over my skin and I really want to get off, but my legs won’t move.
The consultant comes round his desk and perches uneasily on it. He crosses his legs and then his arms. I think he is trying to adopt a relaxed pose. So am I, and we are both failing.
“You have a very good chance of making a full recovery,” he says softly. “An excellent chance.” I want to remind him that’s not what he said a minute ago. A minute ago he said I had ovarian cancer. A minute ago he said it was at a very advanced stage.
He smiles grimly at me and continues, “You’re young. You’re fit. You’re healthy.” Is he talking to the same person? I resist the urge to look round in case there is someone else behind me who is young and fit and healthy. I’m not young and fit. And I’m definitely not healthy. I’m as old as the hills and I have a disease, I want to say. I have a disease that’s silently eating me away inside.
“We must move quickly,” the consultant says. He is young and fit. He looks like he’s just come back from Barbados or Antigua. Some exclusive holiday resort. Sandals, maybe. He is bronzed and athletic-looking. He looks like he swims or works out. His sheer healthiness is out of place in this hospital full of sick people, in this small, airless room with a sick person. “I want your permission to operate straight away.” He is wearing the most awful tie. Whoever told him it matched that shirt was color-blind. I wonder if he has a wife who helps him to get dressed. Perhaps she’s the one that’s color-blind. “Ali?”
I look up. He’s folding and unfolding his arms and legs as he talks as if he’s doing some big, invisible origami. “Ali. I want to prepare you for surgery tomorrow.”
I know I should say something, but I can’t. I nod instead. I want it out of me, this thing. This thing that Dr. James put down to nothing more than stress.
I spent the entire evening being ignored in Casualty, waiting for a bed to come empty so that I could be “observed.” I had this horrible thought that they were either going to parcel up someone and send them home before they were ready because they weren’t quite as sick as me or that they were waiting for someone to die so that I could nip between their sheets. I have been reading far too much about our Third World National Health service in the Daily Mail to feel comfortable here. Anyway, at around three in the morning, when someone did finally “observe” me, they decided I should have been “observed” a lot earlier. About five years earlier, I think.
The consultant glances at his notes. “You’ve got three children?”
I nod. I am hanging on to them by a thread, I want to say, because my husband thinks I’m an unfit mother. It was all I ever wanted to be—a wife, a mother, to have a lovely husband, three children and maybe some roses round the door.
“Had you planned to have any more?”
I don’t know whether I nod or shake, but I feel my head move. I can’t even plan what I want for dinner tomorrow night these days. I try to conjure up images of children that may or may not be born, but fail dismally. I just can’t think that hard.
“Is there someone you want me to contact for you?” he says. “Do you need to discuss this?”
What would be the point? Who would I discuss it with? Not Ed. Why should he care anymore? Besides, even the sight of a blood-stained plaster makes him go pale. Not Christian. How could he understand anything of this? He is another young, fit and healthy specimen. He has no idea what it is like to have your traitorous insides do the dirty on you. How could he possibly advise me on the best course of action? And, as I see it, I don’t have a choice. It’s do or die. Literally.
“Do you have children?” I ask.
The young, healthy consultant looks embarrassed. “Not yet.”
“When you do,” I say wearily, “make sure that you treasure them.”
My eyes fill up with tears and I feel one roll out, over my cheek, in a cold, self-pitying trail, and I watch it splash in slow motion on the hard vinyl tiles. It is followed by another and another and another, until there is a great, long stream of them. I feel as if my heart is about to snap in two. I stare at the tears pooling at my feet. This floor looks like no one has taken a mop to it in a long, long time.